Weather can impact the safety, efficiency, and capacity of operations of many businesses. In some cases, weather conditions may require that a business stop operations altogether, leading to detrimental economic impacts on that business, customer dissatisfaction, and other such unwelcome consequences. Weather projection products designed to assist with operational decision-making can be particularly helpful to a business whose operations may be affected by weather conditions. Affected businesses can similarly benefit from decision-making support tools that include as inputs weather projection products covering broad spatial ranges and temporal ranges, thus facilitating both proactive and reactive operations management and minimizing the weather's adverse effects on businesses utilizing such tools.
Although various weather projection products and decision support tools are available on the market, they suffer from a fundamental flaw—namely, such products and tools operate as independent platforms, each of which generates or processes weather projections products reflecting only a subset of the spatial ranges and temporal ranges that may affect a business. As a result, businesses using such products must rely on piecemeal information regarding the weather's impact on their business operations and cannot obtain a comprehensive understanding thereof. Such informational gaps and discontinuities limit the ability of businesses to methodically manage their weather-affected operations.
A variety of weather projection products currently exist to deliver to operations managers the weather information appropriate for strategic and tactical stages of operational decision-making. For instance, weather forecasting products typically rely on physics-based numerical modeling of the interactions among various physical processes in the atmosphere and between land surface and the atmosphere. Such physics-based models usually assume initial and boundary conditions for atmospheric layers and solve in the time domain differential and partial differential fluid dynamics equations representing such physical processes. Physics-based models usually conduct data assimilation, which is a numerical process that combines a model forecast field with the available weather observation at the current time step; minimizes the difference between the forecast and such observation; and adjusts the model forecast trajectory in order to improve the forecast model at future time steps at such time intervals so as to achieve optimal results of future predicted atmospheric states, i.e., weather forecasts.
In contrast, weather nowcasting products are generally based on the tracking and extrapolation of weather features observed by weather radar and satellites that, in most cases, are persistent and continuous in short range time and space. By employing efficient image processing and statistical techniques in lieu of the physics-based equations used in weather forecasting, weather nowcasting is able to generate short term weather projections, e.g., for two hours into the future or less, and provide weather projection updates at very high frequencies, as little as every few minutes. Weather prediction updates at such rates are not presently possible with weather forecasting techniques because calculating and processing data using physics-based modelling is computationally taxing and therefore too time consuming. However, because weather forecasting techniques are physics-based, they can generate weather projections further into the future than can weather nowcasting techniques.
As an illustrative example, air traffic management and control (“ATM/C”) personnel require weather information with varying spatial and temporal scopes throughout various ATM/C stages—such as flight planning, takeoff sequencing, tower control during taxiing and takeoff, terminal radar approaching control during aircraft ascent and descent, and en route area traffic control during cruising—to achieve and maintain safety, operational efficiency, and air space capacity in ATM/C.
Normally, at the strategic planning stage, e.g., more than two hours before a scheduled flight, ATM/C decision-making depends on weather forecasts for preparing and adjusting flight plans. During the strategic stage, ATM/C personnel with access to relevant weather information have the capability to manage air traffic proactively by generating re-routing plans to circumvent weather-blocked airspace, or by executing ground delay programs or ground stop programs to prevent burdening the reduced airspace capacity. Strategic ATM/C ground delay programs and ground stop programs offer improved operational aviation safety, balanced airspace demand and capacity, and reduced aviation fuel burning.
At the tactical stage, e.g., within two hours of a scheduled flight, ATM/C decision-making depends on real-time weather observation and “nowcasting,” i.e., very short term weather projections. During the tactical stage, ATM/C decision-making tends to be reactive and can involve such ATM/C mechanisms as airborne holding until adverse weather impact has passed, or diverting to alternative airports aircraft that have encountered adverse weather and have fuel levels that limit their airborne time.
The currently available weather projection products applying various forecasting or nowcasting techniques operate as independent systems, and each system captures weather information from only a subset of the spatial ranges and temporal ranges that are necessary for robust strategic and tactical operational decision-making. Additionally, such weather projection products generally operate on different computing platforms and do not communicate with one another. Moreover, such weather projection products are often incompatible, therefore leading to data gaps or otherwise inadequate operations management support. In particular, the data output from one weather projection product might be prohibitively large such that it cannot be transferred to another weather projection product in a timely manner so as to adequately support operational decision-making in real time.
Thus, there are significant disadvantages associated with currently available weather projection products and decision support tools; no such currently available products equip businesses to adequately manage their operations in a safe and efficient manner in the face of weather conditions that could otherwise undermine operational execution. What is needed are systems, methods, and apparatuses that can provide integrated timely, accurate, and continuous weather information covering the entire spatial and temporal spectrum relevant to strategic and tactical operational decision-making for a designated event or set of events.